


What The Water Gave Me

by RisingShadows



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, Booker-centric, But it's kind of vague, Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Everyone else is mentioned at least once - Freeform, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Temporary Character Death, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:41:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25900762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RisingShadows/pseuds/RisingShadows
Summary: Booker remembers his first death. When he was still Sébastien le Livre, when he still had a family to live for, to fight for. When his sons still lived and the one he loved was still waiting for him to return. When he was nothing more than a coward, a deserter in the face of an impossible war he had no intention of dying for. But what other option did he have but death when they were cut down by bullets and starvation? By an unforgiving winter and the guns of their enemies in an ill advised war that only ended in more bodies and more pain. Sébastien had found none. Now, looking back 200 years later, Booker didn’t see any either.
Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Quynh | Noriko
Comments: 4
Kudos: 67





	What The Water Gave Me

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Florence + The Machine

Booker remembers his first death. When he was still S é bastien le Livre, when he still had a family to live for, to fight for. When his sons still lived and the one he loved was still waiting for him to return. When he was nothing more than a coward, a deserter in the face of an impossible war he had no intention of dying for. But what other option did he have but death when they were cut down by bullets and starvation? By an unforgiving winter and the guns of their enemies in an ill advised war that only ended in more bodies and more pain. Sébastien had found none. Now, looking back 200 years later, Booker didn’t see any either.

Sébastien hung for three days. Dying and living and dying again while the soldiers watch. Each death like clockwork, his body trembling minutely as he struggles to remain still and silent. The wind his only savior as the bodies around him swayed with each gust. Sébastion struggling to resemble the corpses of the men who hung with him. 

It is almost amusing now when so much time has passed, to know that death is more of a second skin. A lover that reaches out for those scant few seconds when the bullets find their mark. When the hangman's noose catches him, suspended from the ground as he chokes and dies and wakes up to repeat it all. The soldiers slowly winding their way past to leave him, hanging and dying over and over again. He wonders if they notice the bruises that must rise and fade with each death. Wrapped around his throat alongside the frostbite that takes his limbs with each hour he hangs. He thinks perhaps it might be some twisted form of penance, a punishment for his cowardice. And then all thought is gone, the air forced from his lungs, his muscles spasming as he tries to remain still and silent and dead, dead, dead while his body hangs. Suspended by the noose once more where in the interim of each death he catches hints of another. His own moments of weightless death interspersed with dreams and thoughts and a deep rage that flickers through him. 

They are dying just as quickly as he is. But they die from the water that fills their lungs, the metal coffin they are trapped in. The blood they can taste in the water, their bones shifting beneath their skin as they scream wordless rage. Something about them is familiar, it wraps its way around him as he is dragged back to his own never ending punishment. Pulling at his limbs as his hands twitch, as his mind wanders and he wishes he could struggle once more. Wishes he could tear himself loose and end this cycle. But there are soldiers walking by, their faces turned away from the men who hang beside him. From Sébastien who should be dead but is awake again, will always wake again it seems. 

And then he dies once more and he drifts again. A womans voice rasping in his ears, pulling and dragging at him with a ferocity he can’t begin to understand. It holds him there, caught in that never ending cycle of death. Water flooding his lungs, burning as he screams, as he breaks his fists against the metal. 

For a time, maybe a day, maybe an hour, maybe simply a number of minutes, he is trapped. Drowning and screaming, his fists bloody and broken. There is rage simmering under his skin tempered by an odd twist. Something wild tearing at him as if to reach back even as his lungs ached and he jerked back to the gallows and the noose that still held him suspended in the air. Even then, even hours later, even when he was still dying from the noose around his throat, that thoughtless rage simmered there. Caught in the back of his head, almost as if in his peripherals as it dragged at him. Swelling with each death as if to reach back. In the end, he dies for three days. In the end, it is gone for only a few hours before he dies again. Freezing as his body shuts down and his breath stutters in his lungs and the screaming fills his ears and he almost wants to ask her to stop. 

He doesn’t. And then he meets Andromache and Yusuf and Nicolo and he never considers it again. Even when he knows he could pull himself away, could turn away from the never ending death that pulls at him. 

She doesn’t know if they are looking or even if they still care. He won’t leave her to suffer alone. 

Now, Booker has died a thousand times. The press of rage still shattering through him with each death when he is caught between dead, alive, and awake. His dreams still filled with the breathless ache of water filling his lungs, the cold press of the depths surrounding him. He thinks if she wasn’t drowning she’d freeze. Trapped in the dark and the cold, unable to see, unable to breath, unable to break free. Bound in chains and rope that was slowly breaking apart over the centuries. He wakes choking on nothing, shivering as if he was the one trapped and dying. He wakes with the phantom press of a noose around his neck and the memory of waking again without air in your lungs, suspended above the ground as you choked and died and lived again and again and again. 

There are times, stretches of days that turn into weeks, sometimes spanning months where he spends more time dead than alive. (He thinks the others would have an issue with that, with his choices at the very least, with his decision to run from this life that he can’t consider living throwing himself into whatever fight he can find.) When he runs from his dreams and falls into the rage he can taste with each death. Not enough to sleep and see and feel and live her death, but enough to know her. To feel the rage she holds within her, to feel the press of her mind against his as they die in tandem with each other and breath a moment later, he chokes on a gasp and she chokes on water and they are the same he thinks. 

Caught in a never ending cycle, trapped and broken. But they are nothing alike. He has destroyed his place in his family, has torn apart those bonds with his own apathy and grief and fear. His grave is of his own making and that is what sets them apart. The coward that could not leave his life behind, who stayed until it broke what little of him had truly returned. What little of him had stumbled away from the noose and the bodies of those who had not been so fortunate (or so cursed) as to wake from death. 

Quynh is more than a lost warrior, more than whatever it is that Nicolo and Yusuf and Andromache remember. She is something wild and untamed and broken and shattered. Powerful and fierce, stronger than the iron that rusts around her and keeps her bound at the bottom of the ocean like a goddess trapped and bound in the chains of those who feared her power. 

Booker is nothing like her, the coward who lost one family and turned his back on the family that found him after. (Booker remembers when they first found him, when they came to him speaking in broken french and he could barely recognize them from the dreams that came with death. His dreams full of the woman who drowned and lived again. The woman who had suffered with him while he hung. The rage that flickered at the edge of his mind with each death, when he hung, when he starved, when he froze.) Booker is nothing more than the traitor who couldn’t,  _ wouldn’t _ , see the family he had for the one he lost and lost it in turn. 

But that isn’t what makes them so similar, isn’t what binds them aside from the dreams he can’t shake that he hopes Nile will never suffer from. He has forgotten how to live and breath and do anything more than suffer and wait for the final death he knows will come eventually. He thinks perhaps she has forgotten what it means to live, to walk and talk and do anything more than die and scream into the void of the ocean around her. He thinks she’s forgotten everything but the rage he feels with every death and every dream. 

He wonders if he could find her, if he could help her. If someone who has forgotten how to live could teach someone else. 

He doesn’t have many options left when he turns from dying to liquor to stem the dreams and forget the pain and the tight pull of a noose around his throat and the breathless moment as you died with your lungs aching and your throat burning only to wake in the same place and die again and again and again. 

And then she is there. A glass of water in one hand and the rage he remembers so well shimmering around her like a cloak, like a shield. A palpable thing, built to protect her from the world around her and the life that left her behind while she suffered. 

She kills him ten times in the next hour. She screams and rages and slips from kind and caring to murderous in moments before she sits, silent and dark and broken beside him on the blood soaked floor of his apartment and asks him if he can teach her to live. The rage still simmering behind her eyes, her hands twitching with every move he makes while he watches her. 

He wonders if she can feel him when he dies, if the flashes of rage and pain and death he gets with every death are something particular only to him. For a brief moment after she has slit his throat for no particular reason, he thinks that maybe she  _ can _ feel what he does as he dies. Maybe she seeks the apathy that crushes him from all sides. The complete absence of the rage she carries. Maybe she thinks she can learn from it if she holds onto it even once he’s returned, choking on air and refusing to fight as she considers the blade still clenched in his hand, the cool metal pressed against his collarbone once more. (He doesn’t have the heart to ask. He’s never been capable of learning her rage, or her hate. But maybe she’ll learn something from him where he failed to learn from her.)

He wonders why she would ask him to teach her to live when Nile is out there, with Andy and Yusuf and Nicolo. He only asks once before she slits his throat and he wakes with his head in her lap and the salty touch of tears on his cheeks. 

Instead he lets her stay. Stocks his fridge with something other than liquor for the first time since he watched their backs as they walked away. Teaches her French and Italian and Spanish. Listens as she whispers in the dark when he has just startled awake from another dream at the bottom of the ocean, trapped in the twisted, rusted metal of a coffin that was never his. 

He knows it’s only a matter of time before Nile dreams. Only a matter of time before they arrive for their lost warrior, more of a wildcat with sharp eyes and dangerous claws and he’s alone again in his exile as he should be. Quynh doesn’t seem to mind. Not when she’s laying languidly against his side. Face pressed against his shoulder in a silent apology for the blood that currently drips down his chest where she had struck without thought as he draws himself back from death. The rage he can usually taste a distant echo compared to the odd touch of something else that flickers through him in the brief moment that he is caught between living and dead. 

It’s three months to the day since she arrived when she turns to him and asks to leave. To travel, to wander as she and Andromache had done centuries before. He can’t find a reason to argue, doesn’t think he would’ve had it in himself to argue anyways when he takes her hand and asks where she wants to go. What she wants to see. 

Slipping from place to place as Quynh wanders and he follows in her path. Teaching her what he can of a language and a people and a place as they slip through like ghosts. Wandering through museums and battlefields and long forgotten stories. Some that Booker saw, some that he was told. Quynh teaches him just as much as he teaches her. Tales and stories and a number of languages that she had held even as she drowned and suffered and broke. 

The only things she has left of a home and a people she had left behind a millennium before when she had died and failed to stay dead. 

He thinks this might be some type of penance even though the others have yet to find out. Teaching this broken warrior something he’s never learned himself. Keeping his head low as he showed her the world she’d forgotten as she drowned. As he showed her everything she missed when all she had to watch was him as he drowned himself in his grief alongside her. 

When they come, she’ll go with them. He has no doubts on that. But he might be able to teach her to live again before then where he knows Andy won’t be able to. Not when faced with what has haunted her for so many centuries, for as long as Booker has known her. Might be able to ensure she doesn’t fight when she realizes that he won’t be joining them for another 99 years when he finally convinces her that its time. 

For now, for now he’ll do what he can. He has another 99 years to wait. He won’t let her wait that long.

**Author's Note:**

> Please comment and kudos to let me know what you think! This is a little bit of a mess because it was originally supposed to be part of a longer series/fic but it didn't fit and I still wanted to post it so here yall go.


End file.
